What a lonely, clear-eyed, unbreakable thing — to hold the truth of your own worth in secret, to let the people who should have loved you best show you exactly how little they would, and to bear that knowledge in silence for fifteen years rather than buy their attention with the promise of money.

She could have told them.

She could have used it.

A word about that land and they would have come running, and called every week, and fussed over her, and she knew it — and that, I understood at last, was precisely why she never said it.

She did not want the love that money buys.

She wanted to know who would come when there was nothing in it.

She found out.